Music Streamer
What type of cable do I need to connect a PC laptop to a music system?
Question:
My friend wants to be able to play music from his i-tunes into his music system.
Answer: well what I do is get a cable that has the headphones jacks on both ends, then connect one of the ends to the laptop, then the other to an adapter that lets you connect RCA to standard headphone jacks, then connect RCA cables to the receiver.
 HRT Music Streamer plus DAC USB Digital to Analog Converter US $229.00 
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 Sonos ZonePlayer 120 multiroom Music Player ZP120 US $189.99
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I'm going to tell you how you can improve the quality of the audio track on your videos without having to spend any money. But first, try an experiment. Go to any website with videos on it. Look for some videos created by small businesses or "regular folks," not by massive corporations like major record labels, CNN, etc. There are millions, if not billions of these videos out there on the web. Some of them really look fantastic. But for some reason, they almost all have crappy audio. Why is that?
Here's why. Though it is more complicated (to me anyway) to edit and produce video than audio, actually capturing it is easy. The latest video technology race has brought "high-definition" video into consumer cameras costing less than $200. But for some reason, there was no simultaneous race to make it easy to capture good audio on these cameras. So we now have powerful cameras everywhere with the same cheap built-in microphones that were on the old camcorders! Result: good video with bad audio.
Audio quality could be drastically improved if these cameras even had an input for you to hook up an external microphone (technique #1 below). But almost none do! I know this because I recently spent months trying to buy a camcorder that did have one. It was only when I started looking at the more expensive "pro-sumer" cameras that I eventually found one.
OK, so what's to be done if you want good sounding audio on your videos? Should you just give up and spend 800 bucks on a camcorder with an external mic jack? Not so fast!
There are things you can do crank up the sound quality of SOME kinds of videos, namely, the ones that are narrated by someone not in the video. Since these narration videos are more and more common, chances are that you can benefit from these two techniques.
1. Improve signal-to-noise ratio. The reason why I said these techniques won't work when the narrator is in the video, is that a camera without an external mic input will be far away from a talking subject in a video. That, all by itself, is one of the biggest causes of poor audio. The further you are from a microphone, the less of YOU it hears, and the more "other stuff" it records. That other stuff can be echo, reverb, birds, cars, air...ANYTHING that isn't the voice of the narrator. We call this "noise." When you have lots of noise and not much narrator, you have a bad signal-to-noise ratio.
To improve this, you need the narrator to be very close to the mic, so the voice will be much louder than the noise. You can do this even with a cheap microphone, but you'll need to record after you've already shot the video, save the resulting audio, and add it to the video on your computer.
2. Clean up noisy audio in the computer. Even recording with a microphone close to your mouth, a cheap microphone plugged into a computer soundcard will generate other kinds of noise. But that can be cleaned up a lot using "noise-reduction" tools in audio editing software. You can get such a program, called Audacity, for free on the internet.
Use both of the above techniques, and the audio quality on your video will be much better. You can find video tutorials that will walk you through how to do these techniques, as well as lots of other great audio tips and tricks, at Home Brew Audio.
Jake Weston
Learn to record and produce professional-sounding audio from home without spending a dime for gear. Fun and short video tutorials show you how. 1st 8 videos free. Follow-on lessons just $7.00 at http://www.homebrewaudio.com/welcome.
http://www.homebrewaudio.com/blog
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Filed under: Digital Music Server
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